vil. During the tempest one cannot
abandon the storm-beaten ship and cross over to a safer vessel. It is
necessary to return into harbour and make the transhipment where calm,
or relative calm at any rate, reigns.

Inasmuch as Europe is out of equilibrium, a settlement, even of a
bad kind, cannot be arrived at off-hand. To cast down the present
political scaffolding without having built anything would be an error.
Perhaps here the method that will prove most efficacious is to entrust
the League of Nations with the task of arriving at a revision.
When the League of Nations is charged with this work the various
governments will send their best politicians, and the discussion will
be able to assume a realizable character.

According to its constitution, the League of Nations may, in case of
war or the menace of war (Clause 11), convoke its members, and take
all the measures required to safeguard the peace of the nations. All
the adhering States have recognized their obligation to submit all
controversies to arbitration, and that in any case they have no right
to resort to war before the expiration of a term of three months after
the verdict of the arbiters or the report of the Council (Clause 12).
Any member of the League of Nations resorting to war contrary to the
undertakings of the treaty which constitutes the League is, _ipso
facto_, considered as if he had committed an act of war against all
the other members of the League (Clause 19).

But more important still is the fact that the Assembly of the League
of Nations may invite its members to proceed to a fresh examination
of treaties that become inapplicable as well as of international
situations whose prolongation might imperil the peace of the world
(Clause 19).

We may therefore revise the present treaties without violence and
without destroying them.

What requires to be modified there is no necessity to say, inasmuch as
all the matter of this book supplies the evidence and the proof. What
is certain is that in Europe and America, except for an intransigent
movement running strong in France, everyone is convinced of the
necessity of revision.

It will be well that this revision should take place through the
operations of the League of Nations after the representatives of all
the States, conquerors, conquered and neutrals, have come to form part
of it.

But in the constitution of the League of Nations there are two clauses
which form its fundamental weakne